How we raised five million without warm intros (mostly)

The standard fundraising advice that most early founders absorb is: warm intros only, never cold-email an investor, build your network first and your round will fall out of it. It is good advice for people who already have the network. It is useless advice for everyone else.

We did not have the network. Neither of us went to Oxbridge. Neither of us worked at McKinsey or Goldman. We have raised over five million pounds for our own companies, and somewhere close to ten million across the wider portfolio we have been part of. Roughly two-thirds of the cheques on the cap tables of those companies started as a cold message.

This essay is the playbook, as honestly as we can write it.

The thing nobody tells you about warm intros

The reason warm intros are so heavily evangelised in the startup press is not that they are the only way money moves. It is that they are the easiest way money moves, if you happen to live in the world where they exist. If five of your university friends already work in venture, your first round is essentially a phone call. The friction is so low that the model becomes self-perpetuating: you raise, you get added to a few WhatsApp groups, you start making warm intros yourself, and you genuinely cannot remember what cold fundraising felt like.

Two consequences follow. The first is that the warm-intro economy is a closed loop. The second is that everyone inside the loop sincerely believes it is the only loop. They are not being malicious when they tell you to never cold-email. They simply have no working memory of what it is like to fundraise without the loop, because they have not had to.

The honest update for 2026 is this. The loop still exists. It is still the highest-conversion route into a round. But the door to cold outreach has cracked open further than at any point in our careers, for a specific structural reason: AI has made it possible to write outreach that is fully personalised, at scale, at quality, by a single founder, in a single weekend. The asymmetry between a generic “Hi NAME, would love to chat” email and a four-paragraph note that demonstrates the founder has read the investor’s last three pieces of writing and can speak to their thesis is enormous. That asymmetry used to require three weeks of research per investor. It now takes about twenty minutes.

The investors we know are reporting the same thing. The volume of cold inbound has gone up. The quality of the top decile of cold inbound has gone up by an order of magnitude. They are taking calls off that channel that they would not have taken three years ago.

So: warm intros first if you have them, cold a close second, and the gap has narrowed dramatically. Now the playbook.

The five mistakes that kill cold outreach

We have read several thousand cold investor emails between the two of us, both as recipients and as people debugging the outreach of founders we work with. Almost every bad one is bad in one of five specific ways.

One: the email is about you. Investor inboxes are full of founders explaining their journey, their mission, their team’s background. The opening of a good cold email is not about you. It is about them. Specifically: it demonstrates, in the first sentence, that you have understood something they have written, invested in, or said publicly, well enough to comment on it. This is a hard constraint. If you cannot find anything they have said publicly that you have an opinion on, you are emailing the wrong investor.

Two: the ask is fuzzy. “Would love to grab a coffee” is the death of cold outreach. The investor cannot price what you are asking for, so they price it at the highest possible cost (an hour of their time) and say no. A clear ask — a fifteen-minute call this week to share the deck and a single specific data point I think will surprise you — is dramatically more likely to convert because the cost has been bounded.

Three: the deck is attached. We have lost count of the cold emails we receive with the deck attached as a 14MB PDF on the first contact. Investors do not open attachments from strangers. The deck goes in the second email, after they have said yes to talking. The first email is the trailer, not the film.

Four: the timing is wrong. Investor inboxes are saturated on Monday morning and Friday afternoon. They are most likely to read carefully on Tuesday and Wednesday mid-morning. This is not a fashion. It is a measurable effect we have seen repeatedly across our own outreach and the outreach of the companies we work with. Send Tuesday at 10:30. Follow up Thursday at 11:00. Move on by the second week.

Five: there is no follow-up. The number of founders who send one cold email, get no reply, and conclude “cold doesn’t work” is staggering. Cold conversion at email one is around two percent at the very top end. Conversion across a three-email sequence, properly spaced, is closer to twelve. Most of the money is in the follow-up. Most founders never get there because the first email feels like enough effort.

What we tell founders to actually do

If we are sitting with a founder we are incubating, and they have no warm investor network at all, here is the actual move.

First, build a list of one hundred investors who would plausibly back the company. Not a hundred VC firms — a hundred specific people. A partner, an angel, a family office principal. Public information only at this stage. The list takes about three days to build properly. Most founders try to skip this step and pay for it later.

Second, sort the list by fit, not by name recognition. The investor whose thesis exactly matches your wedge is worth more than the famous investor whose thesis is a stretch. You will get more enthusiastic conversations and a much higher conversion rate from the long tail of perfect fits than from the short head of well-known names.

Third, write the outreach in batches of ten, by hand, with model assistance for research depth but not for voice. The personalisation is the entire point. A batch of ten well-written cold emails should take half a day if you have done the list properly. If it is taking longer, your list is too cold; if it is taking less, you are not personalising enough.

Fourth, track everything. Spreadsheet, Notion, Airtable, whatever. Every email sent, every reply, every meeting booked, every term sheet. This is the unglamorous part. You will not feel like doing it. Do it anyway. Fundraising is a sales process and sales without a pipeline is hope.

Fifth, layer in the warm intros you do have, even if they are weak. A second-degree connection from LinkedIn, an investor who replied to your tweet once, the partner of a founder you know slightly. These are not as strong as a hot referral from a portfolio CEO, but they are dramatically stronger than pure cold. Layer them in alongside the cold campaign, not in place of it.

Sixth, and most importantly: do not stop sending emails when you have your first yes. We have watched founders close a single £50k angel cheque, take their foot off the outreach pedal entirely, and then be unable to fill the round because they assumed momentum would carry. Momentum carries until it doesn’t. The campaign runs until the round is closed.

The HNWI loop, specifically

A piece of this we want to write about explicitly, because it is something we run more than most, is the high-net-worth individual route. HNWI is a polite acronym for rich people who are not professional investors but who do, on occasion, write substantial cheques into private companies.

Almost nothing written about UK fundraising covers this group. The standard playbook treats them as a kind of fallback for founders who failed to get into VC. This is a strategic error. For the right kind of company — operating businesses with real revenue, AI-flavoured but commercially grounded, a defensible UK market — HNWI capital is often better than institutional. It moves faster, asks fewer process questions, and does not push you toward a fundraise cadence that does not suit the business.

The trick with HNWI capital is that it is genuinely network-gated. You do not find a hundred HNWIs on a list. You find five, and then they introduce you to the next ten. We have spent fifteen years building exactly this network, mostly by accident, mostly by being a useful operator in the rooms they were already in. It is the single piece of leverage we cannot package up and hand to a founder. It is the reason the Moonlabs Incubator has a 10% success fee on the round we help you close: because a chunk of what you are paying for is access to a network that genuinely took fifteen years to build, and that closes rounds faster than any other channel we have ever used.

What we want you to take away

If you are a founder reading this, the headline takeaway is that fundraising in 2026 is more accessible to the network-less than it has ever been, and the gap between the founders who run a real campaign and the ones who send three emails and give up has never been wider. Both of those things are true at once. You can raise from a cold start, but you have to actually run the playbook.

If you are reading this and considering the Moonlabs Incubator, the honest pitch is this. We will help you build the technical foundation, sharpen the wedge, write the deck, model the round, and prepare the data room. And when it is ready, we will make the warm introductions ourselves, to the network we have spent fifteen years building. That is the part of the offer that genuinely cannot be replicated by tools, however clever they get.

The rest, you can do alone, if you have to. We just think you’ll do it faster with us in the room.

Louis O’Connell-Bristow is co-founder of Moonlabs. He has led fundraises across the Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk businesses and writes regularly on the operator economics of AI-native company building. The Moonlabs Incubator is currently open for applications.